At this exact moment, the thing that's really blowing my mind about the poet Larry Fagan is that in 2011, when the New York Times profiled him, his rent in the East Village was $150 a month.
I guess that's a pretty absurd fact to focus on when there are so many other fascinating and important things to say about Fagan. But I also kind of wonder if that psycho-cheap rent, which if he were alive today (he died in 2017), would likely not be that much higher, could actually be a lens for thinking about someone, thinking about the relationship between socioeconomic standing and the freedom to write literally whatever the fuck you want. Would Fagan have been the poet he was if his rent had not been $150 a month in 2011? (It was, according to the profile, $58.50 a month in 1968 when he first rented it.) Is there something really important about not having to make a living from your art? Is that even possible—or desirable—today? Or should that question be inverted: is it really important to figure out how to make a living from your art? I guess it sort of is. But at that point, I'm not sure if we can call it art anymore.
I kind of get the sense that Fagan would agree with me, if he were alive today and could ask or respond to my question. He, like so many New York artists living and working from the 60s through the aughts, had an experience of art that I actually cannot even imagine. It's not just that they could get by working two days a week at the library or video rental or sanitation department and pay rent and groceries; it's also that the demands made on artists to produce a profit surely weren’t the same as they are today. I guess that’s late capitalism for you. But I'm rambling here. Go read Larry Fagan's poetry. That’s what I’m really trying to tell you.
-Eugenie Dalland